The need to cut costs relating to office premises is a growing trend. Effective use of business premises is thus highly valued. Therefore there is a need to design multipurpose rooms, which can easily be adapted to different needs and situations. For instance, a certain room in an office can be used for arranging internal and external meetings, parties and many other different activities. Different uses of the room require different properties from the room. For instance, whiteboards or flip charts may be needed for a brainstorming session, while good acoustics is an important characteristic of a room where lectures are given. TV-screens may be needed for a teleconference, whereas decorative panels may be more appropriate interior elements for a party. If a room is used both for internal and external meetings, there may be a need to retain notes made during an internal meeting on whiteboards for future use, while it is not desirable that the customers or other visitors attending an external meeting can see the content of the whiteboards. Therefore, there is a need to hide the whiteboards during an external meeting.
Also at homes there are situations, where something needs to be hidden from the visitors. For instance, it is common to fasten different notes, invoices and similar papers for example to the door of a refrigerator. However, some of the content of such papers may be sensitive and needs to be hidden when having guests. Even if the papers do not contain any sensitive information, a document collection on a refrigerator door is not visually appealing. Therefore, a turnable notice board with for example a decorative reverse side would be a better option. Also the reverse side of a TV could be provided with a more attractive design, which would allow hiding of the TV screen when the TV is not used.
The above examples and many other situations necessitate a flipping mechanism, to which a flat element with two sides for different purposes can be attached and which can be used for easily rotating the flat element 180 degrees to hide one side of the element and to reveal the opposite side.
Different flipping arrangements are known, but they are often complicated and difficult to use, which has prevented them from becoming more common in office and home environments. There is thus a need for a flipping mechanism, which is intuitive to use and allows easy and quick conversion of various rooms for different uses.